The election of New York City’s first Muslim mayor generated a lot of inane racism across social media, but I remember one Twitter comment for its near-perfect channeling of parochial ignorance: “We don’t want a Shawarma King running the city.” On Election Day last November, I left P.S. 187 thinking: “Long Live the Shawarma King.”

I wonder if that Twitter chud is aware that our mayor, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, has just earned his first royal title in an arena far more important than falafels: filling the city’s potholes. Doing this at a rate of 1,000 per day has made Mamdani the new Pothole King. Last week, he himself shoveled tar pellets over the city’s 100,000th pothole, on Staten Island’s Olympia Boulevard. We haven’t seen this kind of pothole action in a decade.

Like most New York mayors, Mamdani is often out on the street—shoveling snow, shooting baskets, shaking hands in his black suit and white sneakers. But because Mamdani is a Democratic Socialist, being on the street is critical to the content, not just the delivery. During his campaign, he frequently talked about “sewer socialism,” meaning the left-wing leaders at the turn of the nineteenth century who strengthened basic municipal services in America. You can’t get more street level than what runs underneath it. Mamdani has already put himself in this company by announcing a $108 million investment to upgrade New York’s storm drains.

Mamdani’s administration arrived on the heels of one of the biggest New York street stories in recent memory: the resounding success of Congestion Pricing. Last month, the New York Times Editorial Board acknowledged that “over its first 14 months, the congestion pricing system has exceeded even the high hopes of many supporters. It has reduced traffic, improved the quality of life and even provided a boost for businesses.” In short: “Government, done right, has immense power to improve people’s lives.” This was from the same paper that seemed to have had it out for Mamdani last summer, putting its finger on the scale for Andrew Cuomo, the master subway builder who gave the Upper East Side a few more stops on the Q but somehow couldn’t make the trains run on time everywhere else.

Given the Trump administration’s ceaseless assaults on the American psyche, New Yorkers still haven’t been able to give their full attention to Mayor Mamdani. They and Americans more broadly still don’t know what to make of the mayor’s spiritual “home”—the Democratic Socialists of America, whose New York City chapter put eight socialists in the New York State legislature and four in the New York City Council.

And that’s because the professional left in this country secretly looks down on the egalitarianism of the street. In my mind, the ascent of Mamdani and the No Kings marches are of a piece because both have sought to normalize the idea of a collectivity in a culture where private (colleges, clubs, and professional affiliations) trumps public (the streets).

The media especially cannot hide its condescension to street protests. Some do have “patrician disdain” (as Frederic Jameson saw it: “Marxism returns against cultural activity in general to devalue it and to lay bare the class privileges and the leisure which it presupposes for its enjoyment”). But I think it’s more that being a credentialed arbiter has made them wear objectivity as elevated status. You get the feeling that anyone who feels they’ve made it into the Fourth Estate would give away a kidney before they’d ever chant “the people united will never be defeated.”

A recent Bluesky post by Jake Tapper was taken by many to be a parody account when he plugged “cool accessories” from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to promote Constitutional rights. Instead of carrying protest signage written with a Sharpie on the inside of a Pampers box, “journalists” can do their part by showing up at cocktail parties wearing a “Congress shall make no law” branded pocket square.

Yet another reason for the professional class’s wariness of the street owes to the lost exclusivity under MAGA’s recalibration of status solely by wealth. If a college professor and a used car salesman have the same income, the oligarchy sees them as interchangeable. The meritocracy fears a society unintimidated by intellectual professions and will do whatever it takes to separate themselves from the rabble holding signs.

Americans have always voted for charismatic leaders but not new systems. Save for Bernie Sanders and a few independent members of Congress, no one can move the needle on “the system,” meaning this ruthless form of capitalism bent on buying elections. From the days of Fernando Wood, money and patronage made New York politics a corrupt machine. Curomo, the king of patronage, worked the unions (32BJ SEIU service workers, 1199 SEIU healthcare workers, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council) for a built-in voting bloc and amassed an enormous war chest from the richest people in the city and state. Even the Brooklyn progressive Bill de Blasio was continually mired in questionable real estate dealings with the Orthodox Jewish community, including a nursing-home-to-luxury-condo maneuver on the Lower East Side. Eric Adams was the Temu version of everything that came before.

Mamdani, quite amazingly, broke with this centuries-old system. His victory has provided history an alterative case study where the political and capital class are taken off the game board completely. He replaced the assumption that people in power are giving voters something that voters should thank them for with the exotic idea that voter participation is 100% of it, no intermediaries. He beat Andrew Cuomo in the primary without the Democratic party and corporate money, and he only picked up institutional support after winning the primary.

While Mamdani’s novel platform accounted for part of his appeal, there’s no denying that much of it came from being charismatic. The perpetual smile, the reassuring Children’s Television Workshop voice, the unflappable demeanor, the dazzling intellect. Mamdani was made for TikTok celebrity, and his celebrity usually plays out on the street. There are some similarities between Mamdani and James Talarico, another young charismatic who won the Texas Democratic primary to become his party’s U.S. Senate candidate. But Talarico is now drowning in money half a year before the midterm election.

Mamdani earned unprecedented social capital by showing New Yorkers how everything in the “system” is designed to make you feel isolated, to make you forget that you are a part of something larger. The Mamdani campaign reminded a young generation in love with 1970s New York of John Lennon singing “you can say I’m a dreamer / but I’m not the only one.” Or maybe it was the iconic 1974 image of the 34-year-old Lennon wearing that white NEW YORK CITY T-shirt he’d bought on the sidewalk for five bucks. The sleeves had been knifed off, and the wearer stands unsmiling, his pale arms folded. “That was his street stance,” May Pang, Lennon’s companion at the time, observed about the image.

In Mamdani’s New York, it’s not the Bronx that’s burning but the entire country metaphorically. Partly from the insanity of Trump’s newly launched forever wars and partly from a disintegrating economy triggered by his tariffs and global extortion racket, things are going up in flames. Because of a feckless Republican Congress, state and local leaders are facing unprecedented challenges. When Mamdani took office in January, he came out of the gate with high hopes, partnering with Governor Kathy Hochul to give city residents universal childcare. He secured almost $500 million in state funding for the first two years of a program that will be delivered by the city’s roughly 40,000 childcare workers.

But the mayor also learned that the city’s financial situation was much worse than expected (“we inherited a generational fiscal crisis” his people put it). Hochul has committed $1.5 billion (in addition to the childcare money) toward the city’s $5.4 billion budget gap, but few believe she will agree to the tax increases on the wealthy and large corporations that Mamdani has requested to avoid having to make cuts to schools, social services, and police.

You’d think that this existential moment given to us by the Trump regime’s economic failures would be an opportunity for a dramatic change within the system if not of systems altogether. But the old Wall Street playbook with its “growing the economy” propaganda refuses to yield.

A recent opinion piece in The City rolls out the same hackneyed argument: Record corporate profits and bonuses for the rich in 2025 gave the state and city more tax money to spend and now government has foolishly anticipated the same this year. If the war in Iran brings down the market and the anticipated AI IPOs don’t materialize, raising taxes would force corporations to cut jobs and worsen the affordability crisis for those struggling. Follow the logic? Trump’s Republican oligarchy is destroying the country; to protect itself, New York City must help Trump’s Republican oligarchy create greater economic growth for the rich.

Mamdani’s agenda of building affordable housing is meeting similar roadblocks. His flattery of and subsequent rapport with Donald Trump have unexpectedly buoyed hope for securing $21 billion in federal grants to build 12,000 affordable housing units in Queens. But building any housing comes with myriad ways to get bogged down. The city recently determined that four units of low-income housing in Chelsea are too dilapidated to renovate, and that the answer is another public-private partnership where developers would cover renovation costs for six high rises and cough up $1.2 billion to erect nine new mixed-use buildings. Mamdani supports the project because it would give us 1,000 new affordable apartments, but these units come at the cost of 2,400 luxury units. People talk about getting “ratioed” on Twitter, but getting ratioed on housing at almost 2.5 to 1 is pretty bad given that these new “affordable” units will not necessarily be “low” income.

More and more, it feels like our country of seemingly endless choices has winnowed itself down to just two: Democratic Socialism or the absurdity of a chronic oligarchic grifting warlordism that robs American taxpayers while inflating the federal deficit. Yes, it IS an absurd choice but one that Mamdani saw coming: street hassle as a protection racket for the rich.

Addressing a White House Easter luncheon on April 1, Trump declared that “it’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis, you can’t do it on a federal.” How is it not absurd for the world’s wealthiest nation ever to say “it’s not possible”? With Trump’s war budgets and tax cuts sending pain onto states, you could make a case for taxing the rich for fiscal rather than “just” moral reasons.

On the Eve of the Orthodox Easter, Hungarians took to the streets in Budapest to rally for voting out the 16-year authoritarian rule of Viktor Orban. They were sick of the oligarchic corruption at the top and the economic struggles and precarity for everyone else. At roughly the same time, President Trump and his retinue of sycophants attended a UFC event in Miami to watch mixed martial arts fighters attack each other in a cage. You could not make up an image more redolent of both Roman Coliseum brutality and the Lower East Side “street fighter” mythos that gave us the likes of Rocky Graziano. Truly a global split screen: bringing together on the street versus tearing apart in a cage.

Fortunately for New Yorkers, the strength of the Mamdani Administration lies in its resilience and optimism. It came in prepared for whatever street hassles the patronage system and the capital class might bring to bear. To be a Democratic Socialist is to play the long game, and the Pothole King wears many hats. §